Giving up
by carlycarter
Summary: Kate/Juliet one shot. Post Island.


**Giving up**

_...Coz love doesnt hurt._  
_So I know im not falling in love._  
_Im just falling to pieces..._

(Wreck of the day- Anna Nalick)

* * *

Kate's hair shimmers in the moonlight.

Juliet thinks, _she is so beautiful. So beautiful, and she doesn't even realize._

Kate is only standing there. Gazing out at the waves crashing against the shore, mesmerized.

She is silent. She is still.

She isn't doing anything, not the slightest thing, to provoke the anger that is rising in Juliet.

Juliet can't shake off her irritation. _Why must Kate insist on coming here of all places? _

The absolute silence as Juliet approaches is disconcerting.  
Kate refused to turn her head  
Refuses to speak.  
Refuses to be the first to give in.  
It's always been that way between them, it always will.  
It's almost as if time is standing still.  
Juliet feels trapped.

Kate appears unperturbed by the silence that is slowly grating on Juliet's nerves. This strikes Juliet as odd. Kate had always been the first one to scream and shout, to cause a scene. Somehow that is what Juliet expected. Somehow that would have made her feel a little better, she thinks. Anything would feel a little better than this ghastly silent impasse.

She knows that starting a conversation with Kate is like banging her head against a brick wall.  
She does it anyway.  
Every time.  
Not because it feels so good when she stops.  
Just because it's what she has always done.  
Because she cant let it go.  
Kate has always had this hold over her.  
There has always been this invisible inexplicable thing pulling her helplessly towards the other woman.

Juliet stops for a moment. Insidious grains of sand shifting in between the toes of her bare feet, the salty breeze stinging her eyes. If she keeps her back turned to the city behind her, she can almost believe she is back on that island. It stops her heart. It's a little too plausible. She recollects the nights she had sat on that island beach, closing her eyes, desperately imagining that she was back in Miami. The city lights, the sound of the traffic, she could picture it so clearly. As if it were real.

Standing right there that night on the beach, Juliet honestly wonders if they are back on that island. If this freedom, escape, has all just been one of those scenarios they dreamed about those long desperate nights.

Only Kate never dreamed about it. Kate never wanted to play along. At the time Juliet convinced herself that it was just Kate's nature. She was a practical person. She was out doing things, not sitting around on a beach idly dreaming about freedom falling into her lap.

But looking back now, it seems to Juliet almost, sometimes, as if Kate didn't want to be free at all.

The coast was the last place, the very last place on earth, that Juliet wanted to be right now. The hateful, vile, crashing waves reminding her relentlessly of that feeling of tormented terror that plagued her for three years . Hope fading day by day as she lost the very essence of ther person she had always been. She had seen enough of that endless blue ocean for a life time. She longed to be land locked again. She longed for endless earth as far as the horizon stretched. It she never saw the ocean again, it would be too soon.

And yet, it was always the first place Kate would run to.  
How on earth Kate could find any comfort in the ocean, Juliet does not know.  
It had taken her a long time to realise Kate did, infact, find it comforting.  
The idea was foreign to her.  
At first she had assumed Kate was torturing herself.  
Then, that Kate was torturing her.  
Finally she had accepted, Kate liked it here.

Juliet watches her, as she stands wistfully staring out into the vast ocean, longing for something Juliet can't quite grasp. Juliet only wishes Kate would look at her with such longing. There once was a time she had done just that.

"I wish you wouldn't come here." Juliet utters softly, simply. There is kindness in her tone, not rebuke. But she knows that Kate will take it the wrong way. That it will only cause her to become defensive. She doesn't understand it, but it is predictable.

"I didn't invite you to follow me." Kate tells her bitterly without turning to face her.

"One day I won't." Juliet admits sadly. _One day I will give up Kate, like you keep telling me to. One day I won't come running after you. And maybe, just maybe, one day you'll turn around expecting me to be here, wanting me to be, but I'll be gone. And then, you'll be sorry._

"I don't understand why you come here." Juliet muses. "Wasn't all that time trapped on an island enough for you?"

"Everything is so different now we're back here." Kate muses. As she says it, Kate lowers herself, sitting cross legged in the sand, still not tearing her gaze away from the ocean.

"I should hope so." Juliet agrees, smiling cautiously. She sits beside the other woman slowly. They had many midnight confrontations on this beach. Sometimes they both stood, shouting. Kate never sat. She always stood, as if in readiness to run. Many times Juliet found herself alone on that spot, sitting helplessly long after Kate had thrown her parting remarks and left. This time, something has changed. Maybe, this time, Juliet is getting somewhere.

Kate shrugs "And it didn't seem like such a long unbearable time." She adds. _It was different_, Kate thinks. _Everything was different. I don't belong here, I don't belong with you not in the real world. Nothing fits anymore_. _I miss it, I miss you, I miss us. _

"Maybe it was a nice little tropical holiday for you, but those three years were the longest most unbearable of my life." Juliet tells her harshly.

"Thanks a lot." Kate is quick to respond, bitterness dripping from her voice. She knows now just how much she ever meant to Juliet. She was just a distraction from life on the island. Something that Juliet thought she wanted, only because everything else around her was so dismal.

"I didn't mean it like that, you know I didn't." Juliet pleads.

Kate shrugs again. "Whatever."

"You know what Kate, you liked it on the island that much? Maybe you should just go back there then." Juliet finds herself saying in frustration. She regrets it immediately, wants to take the words back. But Kate seems unaffected. That's the thing that horrifies Juliet even more than the fact she had said it.

"Maybe so." Kate agrees.

"Fine." Juliet tells her. She can't think of a parting remark, something sarcastic and bitter, something to cut Kate as deeply as Kate has cut her all these weeks by pushing her away, shutting her out. Sitting on this beach wishing to be so far away from her. As if what they had meant nothing. As if it just wasn't enough. Finally, Juliet grows tired of banging her head against that brick wall.

Juliet says nothing else as she hastily scrambles to her feet.  
This is new- Juliet walking away.  
Kate left sitting there, alone, on that beach.  
She shakes the sand from her clothes.  
She imagines shaking Kate Austen from her life.  
She is done.  
This is what Kate wants, then so be it.  
And without turning back, Juliet walks silently away.


End file.
